A play can be a means of heightening one's political and cultural awareness. This piece by a young Indian writer, Abhishek Majumdar, certainly does that – exploring the human cost of the conflict in Kashmir and deploying Islamic forms of storytelling. I can't pretend to have grasped all of it, but I found it theatrically hypnotic.

At the play's heart is the story of two Muslim siblings in Srinagar who lost their father to Kashmiri violence and who seek different means of escape. Bilal is a talented footballer who dreams of international fame, but is reviled for putting sporting achievement above political protest. His damaged sister, Ashrafi, has retreated into a mythical world of gods and demons. Both are victims of the Kashmiri conflict. But the play suggests that no one can escape its consequences: neither the Indian soldiers whose mission is to quell local unrest nor Ashrafi's psychiatrist, Dr Baig, who exists in his own hellish no-man's-land and who is haunted by the djinn, or spirit, of his son who died fighting for the militant mujahideen.

As you may gather, it's a play that gains from a certain amount of preliminary homework: the more you know about the Indo-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir and the concept of the djinn, the more enjoyable the play becomes. But it stands up in its own right as a fascinating piece of storytelling and as a demonstration of the "madness" (the word that resounds through the text) of clinging to inflexible absolutes. Majumdar seems equally sceptical of the fundamentalist faith of Muslim suicide bombers and of an Indian militarism that packs 800,000 soldiers into the disputed Kashmir territory. What makes his play deeply moving is its sympathy for the region's aspiring children and for those, like Dr Baig, desperately trying to deal with the psychological wounds inflicted by war.

Richard Twyman's excellent production also brings out the play's potent mix of reality and fantasy. The evening starts with storytelling inside a tent and embraces everything from conversations between the living and the dead outside a martyrs' graveyard to youthful attempts to convey the intricate patterns of soccer manoeuvres without a ball. Vincent Ebrahim as Dr Baig, representing the confusion of a man torn between political and racial certainties, Danny Ashok and Aysha Kala as the damaged siblings and Paul Bazely and Jaz Deol as two savagely quarrelling Hindu soldiers are all first-rate. You could hardly expect Majumdar to propose a solution to the Kashmir conflict. What he has done is to explore its effects in vividly theatrical terms.

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